Expressive Aphasia: Reporting a Phonological Retrieval Hypothesis for Auditory Verbal Memory Deficits

The nature of the relationship between language, working memory and auditory-verbal memory seems to remain unclear and classical language and memory models appear to view these skills as completely separate modules. Language processing models consider the existence of devices or buffers which store linguistic information. Levelt [1] describes a short-term memory device called the articulatory buffer in which a phonetic plan is temporarily stored to be articulated. Nickels [2] also describes the auditory processing of words with a model that contains phonological input and output buffers, as well as phonological input and output lexicons. Dell’s interactive activation model for word retrieval postulates that lexical retrieval requires a stage of lexical access and a phonological stage. In the lexical stage, the semantic concepts would activate corresponding lexical representations and, in the phonological stage, the lexical representations would send activation to phonological representations, then the sounds corresponding to the lexical item would be selected. Failures of activation between these interactive stages would explain lexical and phonological difficulties [3].